TUPELO – A group of students at Joyner Elementary is learning just how hot the temperature has been in Tupelo this week.

Hot enough to fry an egg.

Nikki Logan’s second-grade challenge class observed this week as Mother Nature fried the eggs they left outside for five hours.

Each day this week, students placed egg yolks on pieces of tin foil outside of the school at 9 a.m. By 2 p.m., they found that their eggs had fried.

“I poked my egg with a stick and it turned into a yellow liquid,” said second-grader Khaoula Kamal.

Fellow second-grader Tennesson Jordan also enjoyed “being able to see the stuff ooze out at the end.”

The challenge program is for intellectually-gifted students. Logan works with a different group of second-grade students for five hours each day. Each student in the program will visit her once a week.

Logan said she will have a different question each week that her students will answer by performing experiments.

“It is inquiry-based learning,” Logan said.

This week’s question was “Is it hot enough to fry an egg?” Students used the scientific method, created a hypothesis and observed their eggs every hour. They used an iPhone and weather.com to measure the temperature and heat index and recorded observations about the egg’s state, whether it was “shiny” or “bubbly or “smushy.”

The temperature reached as high as 97 degrees, and the heat index topped out at 107 degrees at 1 p.m.

The students also graphed the temperature change over time and answered math problems based on their findings. For instance, they determined the change in temperature from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. or subtracted the difference between the heat index and the temperature.

“For this age, that is a higher-level learning,” Logan said.

When the temperature dropped by three degrees between 1 and 2 p.m., the students deduced that it did so because there were clouds overhead.

So how hot was it?

“It was really hot,” said student Noor Almasri.

Contact Chris Kieffer at (662) 678-1590 or chris.kieffer@djournal.com.

Closer eggs-amination

- Second-grade students at Joyner Elementary observed on Thursday what would happen if they left an egg outside all day. Here were their findings:

- Time: 9:10 a.m.; Temp: 86; Heat index: 95; Status: Raw

- 10:10; 89; 98; Raw, bigger, runny

- 11:10; 93; 106; Bugs on it, shiny, yellowish, big

- 12:10; 95; 105; Bubbly

- 1:10; 97; 107; Slushy, smaller, shiny

- 2:10; 94; 104; Fried D